Kos: Conservatives like to shoot cops

A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and “lying in wait” opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said.

Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns. …

The three slain officers were Eric Kelly, 41, Stephen Mayhle, 29, and Paul Sciullo III, 37. Kelly had been on the force for 14 years, Mayhle and Sciullo for two years each. Another officer, Timothy McManaway, was shot in the hand and a fifth broke his leg on a fence.

Today is Palm Sunday, and I’d ask Hot Air readers to keep these men and their families in your prayers.

Unfortunately, some sick people will use this tragedy for their political hobby horses. We’d like to think that only the idiots at the fringes would do so, but as my decidedly liberal and decidedly rational friend Tommy Christopher found out, that’s not the case. Markos Moulitsas twittered his list to blame the shooting on the conservative movement, and apparently joke about the murders:

I’ll let Tommy pick it up from here:

Dana Houle is a Daily Kos frontpager, not some tinfoil diarist, and Markos is the public face of the liberal blogosphere. Granted, his influence isn’t what it used to be, but he is still the most recognizable, the most closely-associated liberal blogger out there.

When I saw his re-Tweet, I was stunned, and I hadn’t even heard about the Pittsburgh shooting yet. I thought he was talking about the shooting in Binghamton. When I looked back at Houle’s Tweet, and I found the story of the three policemen who were killed yesterday, I could not believe my eyes. As you can see, I tried to get Markos to explain his re-Tweet, unable to believe that these two would be joking about this at all, let alone hours after the tragedy. …

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I think this is shameful. This is the kind of thing I would probably delete at Political Machine. I don’t even see the humor in it, even setting aside the heartless ghoulishness involved.

Be sure to read the rest of Tommy’s piece, because he’ll need the support after taking on Kos. He thinks eight years of “mortal kombat”, as Tommy puts it, has momentarily deranged Markos. I’m not so sure that it’s momentary.

People on both sides like to take non-political tragedies and manipulate them for their own purposes. The Binghamton shooting occurred just before we went on the air Friday, and I remarked that both sides tried to use the Virginia Tech shooting to their advantage, and that I expected something similar from Binghamton. Some people refuse to acknowledge that lunatics do lunatic things, and it has nothing to do with the honestly-held policy beliefs of millions of Americans. Those who would use such horrifying tragedies to smear their political opponents are completely unworthy of engagement, and utterly despicable to boot, regardless of which side they’re on.

Update: Jim Treacher has another screen cap for posterity, just in case Markos tries burying this.